HUMBER ET CETERA
Humber’s Student Newspaper
December 3, 2021
Vol.63, No.10
WOMEN BUILD A PLACE IN ENGINEERING 32 YEARS AFTER MONTRÉAL
Three unidentified women hug each other after laying flowers in front of the École Polytechnique de Montréal on Dec. 9, 1989, after 14 women were killed by a gunman three days before.
Nathan Abraha News Reporter
Jeanette Southwood graduated from engineering in 1988, a year before Marc Lepine walked into École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women, 12 of whom were engineering students. “It was one of the darkest days in the history of Canadian engineering,” Southwood said. Southwood recalls discussions she had with colleagues as the event caught the nation’s
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attention, confused and worried. All they could wonder was why such a tragedy happened although the tragedy quickly became a bittersweet catalyst for change. “The massacre galvanized the engineering profession, its partners and the public to push initiatives to encourage women to pursue engineering,” she said. The Canadian Engineering Memorial Foundation was established in 1990 to honor the memory of the victims of the
École Polytechnique massacre. The foundation encourages diversity in engineering through scholarships. “Since 2002 over 200 women have been awarded engineering scholarships through the foundation,” Southwood said. Southwood now serves as vice president of corporate affairs and strategic partnerships at Engineers Canada, an the national organization that represents the 12 provincial and territorial engineering regula-
tors that license the more than 300,000 members of the engineering profession in Canada. One of their goals is “30 by 30”, an initiative to raise the percentage of newly licensed female-identifying engineers to 30 per cent by 2030. “At the end of 2020, we celebrated a milestone where we have just over 20 per cent of newly licensed engineers being women,” said Southwood, who was inducted into the University of Toronto’s Engineering Hall
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of Distinction and received the Governor General’s Sovereign’s Medal in 2019. “We’re aiming for 30 per cent by 2030,” she said. Angela Wojtyla first heard about the Montreal massacre in her first year of university while she studied engineering. “It made me think could someone in my school have that kind of mindset towards me,” Wojtyla said.
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